Father Brian Pierce: Follow Christ by Engaging in Dialogue
Posted on December 12, 2011 by Sheila Read
Father Brian Pierce with Karen Jessee, a lay DominicanFather Brian Pierce, OP, is a member of the Dominican order, which specializes in preaching the word of God. Father Brian spent 15 years doing ministry in Latin America, working with the poor in Peru and the Lenca Indians in western Honduras. He now travels the world leading retreats on contemplation, mysticism and spirituality, mainly for cloistered Dominican nuns. Father Brian led an Advent retreat last week at the Newman Catholic Student Center in Chapel Hill, N.C., where I spoke with him. Following are excerpts from the interview.
What do you see as signs of the times? What message are people hungry for in these times?
I think we’re living in times where there’s a kind of entrenchment going on. And I think the Gospel is about dialogue. Jesus walks through those three years of his public life and he just interacts with everyone along the way, whether it’s a Roman centurion, whether it’s a Jewish teacher, a master of the law or a Pharisee, a sinful woman, a man possessed by demons, a blind person, a Samaritan. I think one of the greatest gifts that Jesus teaches us is that dialogue with people along the path of life on the journey is the place where we share the good news.
Terrorism isn’t bombs in mosques and churches. Terrorism is when a group goes through a village and tells all the Muslims if you’re talking to Christians you better be careful … Terrorism is the opposite of dialogue.
You often talk about discipleship. What does it mean to be a disciple of Christ today?
Father Brian Pierce, left, and Monsignor John Wall, right, talk with Kevin and Flor Wilkinson.Discipleship is following the same path that Jesus walks. I don’t see discipleship as we’re given this Christian blueprint to live. I think it just means that whatever Jesus did, we’re supposed to do. So where he walks, we walk.
So if he talked to everybody along the way and loved those who weren’t believers and listened to them and heard their story, that’s what we’re supposed to do. When he saw someone about to be stoned because they were a sinner and he took the side of that person, tried to love that woman back into wholeness and face the religious zealots who thought that the law was more important than loving the sinner, well, then that’s what I have to do.
I think we’ve complicated discipleship by making it sort of like a secret list of rules. I think discipleship is a journey of faith and somewhere along the way faith got turned into beliefs and it became a checklist. If you can say you believe in these 10 things or these 15 things or these 200 things, or whatever, you’re a Christian.
I think we have a whole group of Christians, they just check off their list. I did this, I did this, I did this. I believe in this, this and this. I’m a good Christian. They haven’t taken one single step. They haven’t forgiven anybody. They haven’t embraced any lepers, or whoever that might be in our day. It might be a person with AIDS, it might be a Muslim, it might be a divorced person who feels ostracized from the community, it might be a gay person, it might be someone from a different religion.
We’re not going to be saved by saying I believe in Jesus. Salvation is a journey that unfolds when we follow Jesus.
Is it even possible to follow Jesus when we’re living a modern suburban life, with our time occupied by our jobs, our families, our nice homes?
I don’t think it’s possible today to say we live in a world where we don’t encounter other people … I think we miss a lot of wonderful opportunities to cross the boundaries and we just choose not to. There are people that have maids. How do they treat a maid? Do we smile at the young Mexican man who comes to pick up the dishes off a restaurant table we’ve just eaten at? Do we say hello to that person?
Paolo. Photo credit: Celso DerettiWe don’t see these people. I think we don’t do very well at looking into their faces … There’s that story I told about the little Peruvian boy, that picture of the Peruvian boy I saw in that photo exhibit. I think those are some of the most piercing words I’ve ever read in my life. That quote of him underneath that picture: “They know I exist but no one sees me.”
That’s the great tragedy. We actually do know that these people exist, but we don’t see them. Nobody can claim ignorance in the age of Internet. So I think we just choose to close our eyes and not look and close our ears and not hear.
And I love that text from the first letter of John. “What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life.” This is what we proclaim. The word of life is the word that lives in all things and all people. It’s the word that spoke that created everything. And if we want to be faithful to the word of God, who is Jesus the word, then we have to touch and see and hear that word in all people and in all things. We cannot render three quarters of the world invisible.
You mentioned the word of God being in all of creation. What is so important about celebrating the goodness of creation to the faith of a Christian?
Photo credit: Rennett StoweTwo things. The first is it’s a wonderful connection or a wonderful avenue for nurturing our contemplative life. The contemplative life is just to live aware of God’s presence. And if everything that is created, all of creation, all of the world of matter that surrounds us, every tree and water and rock and star, if all of that comes from God’s creative hands and, as Genesis speaks, really comes out of the mouth of God, to marvel at it and touch it and celebrate it and care for it is touching God… It’s just so important for our own spiritual life to not take for granted this gift of creation that vibrates with God’s word. It’s everywhere. Every leaf that falls from a tree is an expression of God’s beauty and freedom.
And then the second part of it is, there is this whole environmental movement that’s growing, thanks be to God, in our world today. In our language it’s caring for God’s beautiful work. If our Judeo-Christian tradition believes that creation comes from God, flows out of the very being of God, God breathes it forth and speaks it forth, why wouldn’t we want to just care for it with all of our being? … Why wouldn’t we do everything to care for this earth if we really believe that it all flowed out of God?
I’m not the – I mean I waste water and leave lights turned on and don’t always make the best decisions, but I’m trying to live a more conscientious life to protect our environment. I’m just amazed that there could still be Christians that think all of this stuff is worthless …
Why would God give us something so beautiful if God didn’t want us to care for it? It’s pretty much a no-brainer. If somebody gives you a beautiful gift you don’t just throw it on the floor. You care for it. It just amazes me sometimes how there are Christians who badmouth environmentalists. I don’t get it. We believe that the environment was made by God.
It’s like badmouthing poor people.
Father Brian Pierce greets a member of the choir at the Newman Catholic Student Center Parish.Just to pick up on that—we talk about immigrants as if they were evil. Jesus spent his whole life embracing the other, the one that was different.
[Like] the time he went to Tyre and Sidon and had the conversation with the Syro-Phoenician woman and he said, Oh, I can’t heal your daughter because I’ve been sent to the Jews. And he just has this moment of truth. She’s persistent, thanks be to God, and he finally says, “Woman, I’ve never seen faith like yours before.”
That’s a wonderful story because it shows us that Jesus also had to do some rethinking on this journey. He thinks he’s not supposed to help this woman because she’s a pagan, and yet he stays with the dialogue.
That’s why I think dialogue is so beautiful. Jesus just never runs away from dialogue. Never. And he stayed and she kept getting closer and closer and she finally throws herself down on her knees in front of him and she says, “Lord, I need your help. Give me a piece of this bread that you share with your people.” And he responds, “Woman, how great is your faith.”
So in that one story, Jesus crosses the boundary of religion and Jesus crosses the boundary of culture. He embraces an immigrant and he embraces a person of another faith tradition. It’s scandalous what he says. Matthew is the most Jewish of the Gospels. And for Jesus to say in a Jewish gospel, “Woman, how great is your faith,” to say to a pagan woman, “Woman how great is your faith,” is just earth shattering. I’m surprised they didn’t just string him up right there and kill him. You can’t say that a pagan woman has faith.
It’s a wonderful place to ask the question, what is faith, then? It’s not about beliefs. She followed Jesus. She went with Jesus into his heart. She didn’t know the answers. She didn’t know anything about Judaism, but she walked with Jesus into his heart and that’s why Jesus says, “Woman, how great is your faith.” You came into my heart even when I didn’t think you were supposed to be there. That’s a marvelous story.
It’s also, like you said earlier, a model for our discipleship. It’s not an impossible model to follow.
Exactly. We’re supposed to read these stories and say, how do I do that? How do I let the person who’s different, from another faith, come into my heart, then? Just like Jesus let her come into his heart, even though we might not understand how that could work.
